EastGirlsWest

I remember when I was in elementary school, 4th grade, I think, we had an event called ‘Pioneer Day’. We spent days stocking up a fleet of red, Radio Flyer wagons with all the necessary supplies: tent stakes, rope, snacks, basic tools and sleeping bags. We made covers for the wagons out of thick manilla paper, and organized ourselves into small families for the great pretend trip west.

When Pioneer Day came, we lined up at one of the grassy acres behind the playground, and then our teacher rang a bell to begin the Land Rush. At the sound of the bell we ran like crazy, pulling our wagons, panting to outrace the competition for the best land claim. When we reached the prized piece of land that we wanted, we pulled out our tent stakes, roped off our area, and went to find the teacher who would measure and value our claim.

This was our bland, hopeful, sterilized version of westward expansion. In our homemade pioneer costumes, it all seemed fairly simple.

Joan Didion is from California, and she explores it’s settlement and growth in the incredible book Where I Was From. But her book isn’t a love letter to The Golden State. Instead, she methodically takes apart the myths that define the move west - especially to California - for many Americans. Brave, adventurous pioneers crossing the Sierras? Try heartless, greedy opportunists who left young orphans abandoned in the mountains, starving and bound to freeze to death. Hearty, hard-working settlers with an entrepreneurial spirit? They courted and relied upon federal money from the start. A booming post-war economy that helped grow idyllic, middle class communities? Look at the slow demise of town of Lakewood, and how it bred the infamous Spur Posse.

In Didion’s revised view of her home, the stories and the statistics are often bleak and unsettling. One of the last chapters in the book focuses on the California prison system, noting that in 1995, the state began spending more on its prisons than its two university systems.

In an NPR interview from a few years ago, Didion, a fifth-generation Californian, said she grew up feeling about her home state: “..we paid this immense price to get there…and we were now safe and redeemed and living in this very remote place.”

My voyage to California took place in my 1997 Volkswagen pulling a UHaul trailer, with two of my best friends from my childhood, my past, where I’m from. Driving me to the Pacific Ocean and into my future. Our own dicey moments in crossing the Rockies never amounted to more than turning on the heat to keep the radiator from extreme temperatures. And reaching Las Vegas felt like a surreal stop in a Gold Rush town on steroids after two days in the grand Rocky Mountains and the vast, still desert of Utah.

I’m not sure I felt safety or redemption upon arrival, although I was relieved - in an old fashioned kind of way - at having achieved safe passage. And to me, as an outsider who has settled here, California does seem to have a fearless embrace of what is next, what is new, what is most modern. Although unlike Didion’s experience, I feel this is often at the expense of the past, for which there is little reverence. It is a complicated place, despite it’s sunny disposition.

I know people tend to either love or hate Didion, and I have to confess to being a fan. This book really amazed me, and I could go on and on…but will stop here. If you’ve read it, please comment and let me know your thoughts. If you haven’t, I recommend. Especially if you live here.